Security and data analytics needs a very deep collaboration between industry and academia: DSCI CEO

On the sidelines of 8th Best Practices Meet 2016, ETCIO spoke to Rama Vedashree, DSCI CEO about how the council is working in the new area of Security Data Science by collaborating with industry, academia and governments to help create a big talent poolPankaj Maru | ETCIO | June 25, 2016, 08:05 IST

DSCI CEO Rama Vedashree's aspirational goal is to help India create a strong base of talent and skilled workforce like data scientists and cyber security analysts that can tap opportunities in the new area of SecurityData Science, which is expected to touch $35 billion by 2025.

In a bid to make the aspirational goal a reality in future, Vedashree under DSCI's vision is trying to engage key stakeholders including governments, academia and industry to drive awareness and educational programs. In fact, DSCI has partnered with Lockheed Martin for a new cybersecurity initiative for small and mid-size businesses to mitigate online threats and risks.Interview excerpts...

Brief about key message that DSCI aims to put forth with the industry through the Best Practices Meet 2016?This is the eight edition of Best Practices Meet and this year's entire theme is around Security Data Science. Because we believe that the entire wave of digital technologies' adoption, there would be four key growth levers for the industry to address both globally and in Indian market, includes cloud, solutions around IoT, analytics and cybersecurity. This has been already articulated by Nasscom- McKinsey Perspective 2025 report.

And we believe that the digital enterprise will have three core attributes - customer experience and online services around it, data or decision making through data and secured experience, which is the cyber security part. We believe that data and cybersecurity is where the sweet spot is, which will lead security and analytics to become big disciplines in near future. That's why we are talking about security being a compelling domain for data scientists; otherwise they typically have been looking at lot of problems around verticals like financial services, healthcare, genomics, drug discovery and pharma.

With cyber security becoming very important area where enterprises and governments are losing sleep, we feel analytics will play a big role particularly in terms of prevention. So we believe both in academia and R&D, industry, startups and the entire innovation ecosystem would see lot of solutions around cyber security based on analytics. And already have seen some solutions from emerging startups.

What kind of challenges are you observing in the area of Security Data Science domain?I think overall in the Data Science space across verticals there's definitely shortage of skilled manpower and talent both in academia and in the industry. Because in Data Science you really need people with PhDs and MTechs disciplines, who are skilled in Data Science and overall there's a huge shortage of data scientists as its been mentioned in Nasscom skills report.

In the Security Data Science space, already there's a shortage in the mainstream Cyber Security and when you combine these two domains I think there's a shortage of talent pool and shortage however the academia is beefing up in order to address the talent pool in both in terms of faculties and research space. So skill development is very important aspect.

Secondly in the Security Data Science area, somebody has to bet on innovation first and when you innovate, you need to have those R&D budgets and collaborations with academia to be able to come up with products. However when it comes to the ecosystem of industry partnerships with academia and government funding those projects between academia and R&D, and industry; we not had a good track record of that because government works with academia and vice versa, and industry typically is doing its own R&D.

But in this area of security and data analytics, there has to be a very deep collaboration between industry and academia. So we are working on that and coming up with a roadmap on cyber security domain and industry, where we are looking to facilitate government, industry and academia collaboration.

We had recently visited some clusters in Oxford, UK and hacked their security data centre called Triple Helix, which is a model where the cluster is actually facilitating government funding, collaboration and frameworks with the industry and academia. So we feel if government, industry and academia collaborate - these three pillars can start working together than real innovation can come in short term.

Do you think those challenges are likely to get addressed in short period? I think some challenges would remain in terms of talent short supply, but when the disciple emerges as a big business area than obviously there would be measures that both central, state governments, and universities will take and of course industry will also invest in skills development.

For example, Nasscom and DSCI are working on a sector skills council for cyber security, where are trying to look at ways to develop and partner with university students and faculties on skills development and roll out programs. So at this moment, I would say that there's a great shortage of data scientists, which is a known matter and there's also a shortage of cyber security specialists but once there's enough conscience that this is an area to grow than the talent shortage issues will be sorted out.

In current context of talent shortage, how much immediate impact are you seeing on the industry so far?Not really seeing any immediate impact but if you have to monetize this opportunity over 3-4 times than this talent pipeline has to be built.

What's the goal that you are looking to achieve through such industry programs and events?Overall in this roadmap that we have built for ourselves in the domain of cyber security, we are aspiring to do $35 billion business (services plus products from India to the world) by 2025, training a million workforce and incubating 1000 new startups, so that's the puzzle that we are trying to crack and in that the talent shortage should get addressed. This is an aspirational goal at this point in time and will undertake lot of measures, policies and advocacies like education and technology development, promoting startups and so forth.

(Disclaimer: ETCIO.com was a media partner for DSCI hosted 8th Best Practices Meet 2016 held in Bangalore recently)